1 MEDIA EDUCATION F O U N D A T I O N 60 Masonic St. Northampton, MA 01060 | TEL 800.897.0089 | [email protected] | www.mediaed.org Teen Sexuality in a Culture of Confusion Transcript MICHELLE: I think sexuality is a lot more than just having intercourse. SUSAN DOUGLAS: Your sexuality, particularly when you’re an adolescent, expresses itself in virtually every physical way – in the way you walk, in the way you talk, in how you dress, in what you do, and how you act. MICHAEL: I express my sexuality even though I’ve never had sex. LINDSAY: Sexuality is that little butterfly or knot in your stomach that says I care about this person. RAPHAEL: Sexuality is how a given individual feels toward another given individual, whether it be man to woman, woman to woman, or man to man. SUT JHALLY: Sexuality is one of those things that makes us human. And so the only question then is: how is the society going to talk about it? TITLE SCREEN – TEEN SEXUALITY IN A CULTURE OF CONFUSION MICHELLE: I’ve learnt a lot myself being a peer educator that I can stand up for what I believe in, and I can make a difference in other people’s lives. I am really lucky to have a mother that trusts me. I guess the best way to say it is she really shows that her love is unconditional. And if we make mistakes, well, that’s okay. Just learn from them, and go on. And I was eleven when my older sister had her first baby, and she was eighteen. If I’m eighteen, I want to be out with my friends, and I want to be going to school and going to parties on a Friday night and not having to worry about a babysitter. I think a lot of pressure comes, really, from the media. I don’t think you see a commercial, and you’re going to go out and do what that commercial says, but the media does really set a lot of expectations. And so if you have sex, then you’re going to be cool and rich and famous, and they don’t mention HIV, and you don’t get unwanted pregnancies on TV, and nobody’s getting Chlamydia or Syphilis. I think a lot of people minimalize teenage relationships and say, “Well, it’s just puppy love,” or “it’s just teenage lust,” or whatever. When you’re a teenager, you have feelings, and they’re very real feelings and they’re very intense. I was sixteen when I first had sex. I had sex because I really felt that it was something I was ready to do, and it was something that I wanted to do and I wanted to share with Curtis. We both loved each other and both respected each other and that was a way to further our love and to further our respect and our support. Curt had been having a lot of problems and, especially with drugs, he MEDIA EDUCATION FOUNDATION | www.MEDIAED.org This transcript may be reproduced for educational, non-profit uses only. © 1998 2 was not the same person that I had met two years ago, and we were still friends but decided to date other people. So you know, I said, “okay, well, I’ll date Sam.” As I got to know Sam more, I realized that he wasn’t really the type of person that I wanted to be with, and he didn’t respect me, and I didn’t really respect him. He told all the guys on the hockey team, who told the rest of the school, that I had slept with him and I never had. I had a good time at the prom. I didn’t have a good time with him. I think a lot of times people do have sex when they’re under the influence, and I think a lot of teenagers have sex simply because it’s a way to feel needed and wanted, even if it’s only, you know, for a couple of minutes. But I think, for some people, sex is really an emotional part of a relationship where it’s just continuing the relationship further. If I was going to be in a relationship with somebody, they would have to respect themselves, and they’d have to love themselves because I don’t think you can respect anybody or love anybody unless you respect and love yourself. I know when I go to college, a lot’s going to change, and I’m probably going to change my outlook on a lot of things. But I’d like to think that, you know, I can still have a relationship without having sex. SUSAN BORDO: For human beings, sexuality is the most profound meeting place of nature and culture. At its best, sexuality allows us to give ourselves over to feeling, to other people, to the world. But sexuality is also where we experience most intensely the demands of religion, morality and culture in general. Popular culture, I would insist, has a profound influence on teenagers’ sexuality. That’s where they get their ideas about what is attractive, what’s feminine, what’s masculine, what’s cool, what’s sexy, what’s romantic. People now respond to these images in different ways, but no one exists outside them, in a bubble of cultural immunity. We are all parents, peer groups, rich, poor, black, white. We are all inhabitants of this culture. We need to realize that people no longer learn primarily through verbal instruction in this culture, but through pictures and images, which get directly at fantasy and desire and feed the hunger for stimulation and excitement. These images are created to feed into powerful feelings that already exist – insecurities, fears, and fantasies. Designers and advertisers rarely take responsibility for this. “Fashion is not about reality,” they claim. “It’s not to be taken so seriously.” When fashion designers or advertisers make this argument, it’s kind of baffling to me. Why would a profit- motivated industry pump billions of dollars into creating images that no one takes seriously? Sex is so pervasive, and it’s presented as such an essential part of being an attractive human being, with an exciting and fulfilling life, that if you reject sex, you become the ultimate outsider. SUT JHALLY: We have this notion that we have a free media in a society; it’s an absolute lie. The media are actually not there to provide news. They’re not there to provide entertainment. Their prime function is to sell commodities to us. My question is: whose version of sex is used to sell? The story of sexuality can take on a number of different dimensions. The stories we get are coming out of the male fantasy. The people who are heads of creative departments at an advertising agency are 90% men. The people who are behind the cameras are 90% men. You know, the people making up the storyboards, the people in the editing rooms. Whose eyes are we encouraged to see the world through? SUSAN DOUGLAS: I think teenagers today are surrounded by even more exaggerated mixed messages about sex and about gender roles than we were when we were kids. On the one hand, the person in the news might be Ruth Bader Ginsburg. They see Roseanne mouthing off about motherhood and raising kids, strong assertive women who are perfectly capable of managing MEDIA EDUCATION FOUNDATION | www.MEDIAED.org This transcript may be reproduced for educational, non-profit uses only. © 1998 3 sexual relationships on their own, with a certain amount of strength and fortitude and intelligence. On the other hand, they’re seeing women tied up, bashed, beaten, strapped down, vilified if they so much as step out of line. We continue to see women as just passive, decorative, sex objects, whose main function is to look pretty, have huge breasts, giant pouty lips, and no brain. LOUISY: Sex isn’t that important, but like school is important, money is important. Why do people want to have sex so bad? I don’t understand why. It’s not like I’m totally like, I don’t want to. Just, I just don’t feel ready, that’s it. Physically, yes I am. Emotionally, no I’m not. For me to have sex with someone, I would have to totally love them. And like, that’s where I think making love comes from, because if you make love, then you make a child and that child is like love. I mean, at one time I did feel like I was the only virgin on the Earth, but then like my friend was like, “Well, you know, I’m a virgin and she’s a virgin and she’s a virgin,” and I’m like “yeah, you’re right”. I guess my confidence comes from my mother a lot because she always taught me to not let people tell me what to do. I could not imagine what it would be like to be a pushover, so to be someone who’d have sex with your boyfriend just because you would lose him because that’s just the way I am. I just, you cannot pressure me. I think it’s why I fell in love with Malik. He’s sensitive himself, he’s a sensitive guy. He hasn’t pressured me at all. His eyes are gorgeous; I could just look at his eyes all day.